Five Super Simple Photo Fixes with the GIMP

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While the GIMP offers a plethora of advanced and powerful photo editing tools, it also sports a few easy-to-use features that can help you to instantly improve your photos with a minimum of effort.

Most digital cameras do a good job of figuring out the correct white balance. But tricky lighting conditions or wrong white balance settings can result in a less than perfect photo. The GIMP provides an easy fix for that: choose Colors -> Auto -> White Balance, and the application does the rest.

The red eyes problem is the bane of many point-and-shoot cameras. If your camera doesn't have an automatic red eye removal feature, you can use the Filters -> Enhance -> Red Eye Removal command in the GIMP for that.

The GIMP comes with a perspective correction tool which can come in handy when fixing photos of tall buildings. Choose Tools -> Transform Tools -> Perspective and adjust the perspective. That's it! The Tools -> Transform Tools submenu also contains the Rotate command that can help you to fix wonky photos.

Levels is an excellent tool for fixing overexposed or underexposed photos. The easiest way to use this tool is to let the GIMP do the donkey job. Choose Colors -> Levels and hit the Auto button. Alternatively, you can adjust levels manually by dragging the triangles in the Input Levels section.